[H-GEN] Choice of distro for server

[mick]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:34:36 +1000
Julian DeMarchi <julian at jdcomputers.com.au> wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
> 
> On 03/30/2012 10:29 AM, mick wrote:
> > My Debian experience dates to the 6 months before the release of sarge and 2 months after. The difference between a generic (support EVERYTHING in modules) i386 kernel and one for P4 with 2GB RAM with all required support built-in was very noticeable especially when I pushed it to the edge of reality.
> 
> Wow sarge, thats like 4 years or more ago... You've had squeeze, lenny
> and soon wheezy in between.
> 
> I'd be curious for you to try it again and see how it rates in speed now...
> 
> A 500MB word document, I can attest takes at least 10 - 15 mins to load
> in Windows. I witnessed this when my mother created a document that big
> and she asked me why it took so long to load.
> 
> --julian

My gripe wasn't with the "out of the box" performance, a carefully customized kernel fixed that. The devs were faced with the choice of including either a very generic kernel or a selection of more refined kernels that might well confuse people and they chose the "one size almost fits almost everybody" option. A logical choice given how easy building a kernel is.

Along comes selinux, sticking its slimy tentacles in all over the place and I could no longer boot custom kernels. 

For what its worth I always used vanilla sources rather than the Debian patched kernels except for one try with the Debian sources.

I'm not a performance junkie but I do tend to get anal about storage wasted by masses of unneeded optional 'features' that have been built in to or as dependencies of packages e.g. palm pilot and bluetooth supportbuilt in to email clients, address books, networking, etc.

mick